- [06 November 2026](#)
- [ 6 min read ](#)
### Pantomine. I bet you read that wrong.
### **The short version**
1. Founding is more than product. Branding, copywriting and pitching are skills too, and they reward practice.
2. The cheapest place to practise them is a fictional, disposable brand, where a bad idea costs nothing.
3. Pantomine is Gato Blanco's fake premium underwear label, built as one of those exercises.
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Nobody warns you how many jobs are hiding inside the word "founder." You start because you can build the product, and then you find out that building it was the part you were actually qualified for. The brand, the words on the landing page, the thirty seconds where you explain the thing to someone who matters, the blog post that is supposed to sound like a company rather than a nervous person at a keyboard. All of it lands on you, and all of it is a skill, which means all of it rewards practice and punishes winging it.
The trouble is that your own company is a miserable place to practise. The stakes are real, you are far too close to see it straight, and every name or tagline arrives freighted with revenue and reputation and the small fear of looking foolish in front of the exact people you are trying to win. It is hard to loosen up and make a mess when the mess has your name on the invoice.
So I have started keeping a drawer of fake ones.
The idea is almost embarrassingly simple. Build small, fictional, completely disposable brands, purely to exercise the muscles the real work keeps too tense to train. No customers, no launch, no consequences. If the joke does not land you delete it and nobody files a ticket. It is sketching in a notebook you never show anyone, except the notebook is a brand and the sketching is everything a brand asks of you.
The most recent one in the drawer is a men's underwear label called Pantomine.
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**The drawer so far. None of it is really about underwear; all of it is practice at naming under a theme.**
The name is the whole joke, and the joke is a song. Say “Pantomine” out loud and it slides into “pant of mine,” which sits one lazy syllable from the Sunday-school standard, this little light of mine. This little pant of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. That is the entire strategic foundation, and I stand by it.
***This little pant of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.***
From there it is a pun engine, and a tight constraint is what makes the writing muscle work. Daisy Dukes, because the flowers get you there before the shorts do. Pigs in a Blanket, where the pigs can finally fly, on the one garment that hasn’t got a fly to call its own. Holy Mackerel for the overwhelmed. And Ducks, which earns its place by sitting one swapped vowel away from a word I do not have to print for you to hear it. The newest one in the drawer poses the only question that really matters in a changing room, are you cheekin’?, over a field of startled hens, with who’s the cheekin now saved for the back, where only the committed will read it.
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Ducks. You did the swap in your head, which is the whole point.
Naming under a theme is a real skill, and so is writing in a voice and holding it steady for more than one sentence. Pantomine’s care label reads “do not iron, why would you” and “keep away from open flattery,” and writing ten of those teaches you more about tone than rereading a style guide ever has for me.
***Pantomine · care label***
1. Machine wash cold.
2. Tumble dry low.
3. Do not bleach.
4. Do not iron. Why would you.
5. Keep away from open flattery.
Art-directing the prints, deciding the waistband is black because that is what your eye already expects from the category, learning when a bit has range and when it is a single note wearing a costume: all of it is the same work the real company needs, rehearsed somewhere a bad take costs nothing. That last one earned its keep. I had started with a cheekier sub-line and a name I was fond of, and the exercise is where I found out, cheaply, that one of them was a brand and the other was a punchline that ran dry after the first laugh. Far better to learn that on the fake company.
The exercise also hands you things you did not plan. Somewhere in the middle of it I noticed the name had a second life. Pantomine, pantomime, a whole vocabulary of the stage sitting there unused, so there is a dressier shelf too, named for the places a performance goes and done in the red and gold of theatre curtains rather than cartoon prints.
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Opening Night, the dressier shelf. Following a name into a room you did not know it had is its own small skill.
The underwear was never the point. Gato Blanco builds[ software with serious capabilities](https://netglare.com), the kind meant to stand next to what the big international studios ship, and none of that seriousness asks us to be joyless about it. The studio that spends an afternoon deciding whether flying pigs read better than falling ones is the same studio that will spend a month getting your uptime monitoring right. The playfulness keeps the competence sharp. It is how the instrument stays in tune.
So if you are building something and you can feel the branding and the writing and the pitching outpacing you, I would suggest the same thing I did. Pick a fake company this month. Give it a name, a voice, an About page nobody will ever read. Spend an afternoon letting your little pant shine. You will be better at the real one, and you will have had more fun than the work usually allows.
## Want to help bring it to life?
Half of me wants Pantomine to stay exactly what it is, a thing in a drawer. The other half would quite like to see a real run of the Daisy Dukes. So if any of this made you laugh and you happen to make the sort of things a brand needs, illustration, print, copy, or just dangerous enthusiasm, the door is open. We would build it the same way we built the joke: low stakes, high craft, and nobody takes it so seriously that it stops being fun. That is also, as it happens, roughly how we build the software we actually get paid for.
There is one rule, and it is not up for discussion.
***House rule — All Pantomine meetings have a pants requirement. We are, after all, a serious studio.***
There is also a cheekier drawer, a capsule we call Below the Belt. It does not leave the studio, which, if you think about it, is the whole lesson wearing underwear.
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***Your turn. Name a brand that will never exist, write its care label, and throw it away. Then tell me what you came up with.***
FAQs
How can a founder get better at branding and copywriting?
Practise where the stakes are zero. Build small fictional brands you will never launch and rehearse naming, voice and art direction on them, so the reps land somewhere a bad idea costs nothing instead of on your real company.
What is a disposable brand project?
A fictional, throwaway brand you create only to exercise non-product skills. It has no customers, no launch and no consequences, which is what makes it a safe place to experiment.
What is Pantomine?
Pantomine is a fictional premium men’s underwear brand created by the software studio Gato Blanco as a branding exercise. Said aloud the name reads as “pant of mine,” a play on the song “This Little Light of Mine.”
Why would a software studio design a fake underwear brand?
To keep its branding, copywriting and creative muscles sharp. For Gato Blanco the playfulness is how a studio that ships serious software stays in tune, rather than a distraction from it.
Can I collaborate on Pantomine?
Yes. Gato Blanco is open to collaborators in illustration, print and copy who want to help bring it to life. There is one house rule: all meetings have a pants requirement.
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